Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't you say that pursuing a startup is better than both industry and academia?
Not if you enjoy really theoretical work which is far away from the money.
True, but the number of such people is very small.
Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
21–30 of 127 posts
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#22A really interesting read and very much echoes some of the reasons I chose not to pursue a career in academia. When you realise you're at a fork in the road, and down one route lies being a supervisor's paper-churning-out slave, researching something that doesn't even interest you so the department can get more funding...grnnnh. Edit: To clarify, this was my problem, as a PhD student with a PhD supervisor (not sure w…
I wouldn't say that is an entirely accurate characterization. I don't know anyone in my department doing research that doesn't interest them. Students generally love the research they are doing and are probably a bit more autonomous than your comment seems to imply. I've taken both directions (industry then academia) and in industry I was a code-churning-out slave working on something that barely interested me. Now I…
At the university I studied at, I wasn't the only student facing years of working on my supervisor's pet project in the name of funding. Some people stuck it out, some of us looked elsewhere for academic gratification, some switched supervisor; generally we all ended up doing something we loved, but the general situation at the university wasn't exactly set up to maximise student happiness from the get-go; instead, it maximised publication numbers and grants.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#23We can't generalize. Not all students are like the ones described in this article. I work with CS and CE graduate students 40 hours a week. I help them conduct research. The best of these students have an eagerness and desire to learn. They work on projects at home in their spare time, they learn new languages (just for the sake of learning them), etc. They want to learn C and C++. They love it.
Since I work directly with these kids and have seen dozens come and go, it's easy for me to quickly pick out the good ones. They are the most fun to work with too as they teach me as much or more as I teach them.
I see the average/bad ones too. The ones who do just barely enough to get by. The ones who "code by Google". They are far more common than the good ones. Their work speaks for itself. Poorly written, plagiarized and seldom delivered on time.
Hopefully employers have methods in place to weed out the bad and average kids. And incentives to hire and more importantly keep the best ones.
Just my 2 cents.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that you have it exactly backwards. First, as a university professor (in the U.S.), I don't have a supervisor in the sense the term is used in business. Yes, my department has a chair, but this is a "first among equals" position, periodically elected from among the members of the department. Governance is mostly collegial in nature, and much of the evaluation & promotion process is handled by committee…
You don't have a supervisor. You have many and they hide behind anonymity -- namely your peers who evaluate your papers, grant proposals, etc. In a way this is much worse than having a supervisor in industry. At least your supervisor wants you to succeed. Your peers not so much unless it suits their agenda. The freedom you have is only an illusion. What good is this freedom if your grant proposals / papers get reject…
Well, it sounds like we want to live our lives in different ways. Which is fine. In any case, as I said, academia does have its downside. So, I think, does working for a large company, or starting a small one. Life is full of trade-offs.
> In startups, you can more easily explore ideas and change them without worrying about evaluation methodology. Ultimately, your criteria for success are simple: how many users do you have? how much money are you making? etc.
I find this comment odd. First, how can I explore something in a startup that isn't going to make anyone some money? That sounds like a severe restriction to me. Second, it seems strange to name your evaluation criteria ("how much money ..."), but also say you don't need to worry about it. Of course you need to worry about it. A company that doesn't make any money is going to die.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#25And here we have the reason why just about every single CS department in the US teaches Java instead of C or Scheme.
Java is an improvement though, especially under Eclipse. Even better would be using Python followed by Scala. Perhaps the issue is that too much class time is spent teaching details of a language and its libraries.
Yes, the hours upon hours of instruction in basic CS courses that were devoted to the various mundanities of Java abstractions drove me nuts.
I'd much rather have spent that time learning the more-useful mundanities of memory management in C.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#26Certainly, there's loads of stupid "research" in academia—cranking out papers that interest no one, in order to justify tenure and more grants. However, "90% of everything is crap". The relevant question, before you throw out the entire institution, is: Are there real opportunities to do good work? Good work takes two main forms in academia: research and teaching. Is good research work being done? Is good teaching be…
"The relevant question, before you throw out the entire institution, is: Are there real opportunities to do good work?" I disagree. The relevant question is, "What is the best possible way to do good work, including practical concerns taking into account the behavior of real people and not just theoretical people, and is that what we have? If not, how can we get there?" The way you ask the question is basically the s…
The best is the enemy of the good. I'd shorten the question to "Can we do better?"
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#27Certainly, there's loads of stupid "research" in academia—cranking out papers that interest no one, in order to justify tenure and more grants. However, "90% of everything is crap". The relevant question, before you throw out the entire institution, is: Are there real opportunities to do good work? Good work takes two main forms in academia: research and teaching. Is good research work being done? Is good teaching be…
"The relevant question, before you throw out the entire institution, is: Are there real opportunities to do good work?" I disagree. The relevant question is, "What is the best possible way to do good work, including practical concerns taking into account the behavior of real people and not just theoretical people, and is that what we have? If not, how can we get there?" The way you ask the question is basically the s…
Indeed, comparison with other opportunities is most important. I didn't make that clear. If you can do better teaching and/or better research outside the university, then go for it. (I am wrestling with this decision right now.) That would be a good reason to resign professorship, not the fact that a lot of university people are doing mediocre work.
My understanding, BTW, is that there is lots and lots of fantastic research being done in universities. You have to find it and hang around with the right crowd. Dr. Tarver's problem may simply be that he didn't find the opportunities.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#28And here we have the reason why just about every single CS department in the US teaches Java instead of C or Scheme.
I'd rather see C taught than Scheme. Hardware matters, and a good CS-education should be centered in languages that recognize that.
Software engineering, on the other hand is too important a subject to be left to the schools. Let them learn Scheme on their own. They'll appreciate it more that way.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#29I can't comment on the US experience, but as a student in the UK in the 80s and Canada in the 90s I concur with Mark Tarver.
This is not just a CS issue, it's universal and the real damage is being done in the second tier establishments where grade inflation and dumbed-down courses are endemic. The tier one establishments (Oxbrige, Ivy League etc) can still use their own screening methodologies for aptitude and smarts to minimize the problem. As a result---and to continue Tarver's analogy of the Cultural Revolution---the 'party' is looking after its own whilst the rest goes to rot.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#30And here we have the reason why just about every single CS department in the US teaches Java instead of C or Scheme.
Java is an improvement though, especially under Eclipse. Even better would be using Python followed by Scala. Perhaps the issue is that too much class time is spent teaching details of a language and its libraries.
No. Java and Python and Scala are not improvements. Why? They're too easy. Pointers are hard (relatively). Compiler design is hard. Complexity theory is hard. A loss in any one of these sections is a loss to the degree as a whole. The ACM ICPC helps a little in promoting intelligent problem solving (every CS student should be able to write a program to use Dijkstra's algorithm in under 20 minutes from memory), but it's the university's fault in the end. Fortunately in the United States, some of our top universities seem to have (thus far) escaped the treatment that other ones did. Stanford, Yale, Caltech, MIT, CMU, et al. all continue to teach very much the same curriculum that they taught intro CS students 10 years ago. Systems is a required course and taught in C. Intro programming is a required course and taught in Scheme/LISP. Unfortunately, many schools did not fair so easily and now teach Java or some-such exclusively. I think that this is partially to blame for the number of unfortunately bad computer science students with degrees. How to change this, I have no idea.